Four Steps to Creating Principles and Building A High Performance Workplace

Place two businesses with exactly the same technology side by side and one will outperform the other. Why? Because the culture of one business will inspire people to be at their best on a consistent basis. Business performance always comes back to ... ultimately ... People and Culture.

The Values and the Principles you use to drive decision-making in your business will shape your culture. Your culture impacts both loudly and silently, yet always profoundly, on the outcomes you achieve. Similarly the outcomes (in other words the goals) you choose drive the culture that develops in your business.

Step One: Articulate the Values

Articulating the values that you want to drive the organization is an important part of the visioning process for any organization.

Most organizations identify 6-8 core values they want their business to operate under, that will drive the outcomes achieved by the business. Click here for tips on developing team values. A leadership team that uses their values, to guide every decision they make, unerringly moves their organization to high performance. In order to create your guiding principles you must have already identified your top 6-8 core values.

Step Two: Identify the Irrational Rules, Policies, Procedures

Work with your front-line team members to identify the policies, rules and procedures in your workplace, which either

• have a negative impact on morale or

• are unnecessary obstacles in the way of getting your product or service being delivered to your customer cheaper, quicker and of high quality

Toss out those that are irrational and don't support the business to achieve its goals. Click here for examples of poor decisions due to irrational policies

Step Three: Develop The Principles

As you develop your principles keep these guidelines in mind:

• Your guiding principles spring from your Values

• Involve team members in developing the principles

• The principles need to be consistent with the Vision

• What experience the organization wants to deliver to its customers

• Ensure the principle doesn't outline the exact "how to do", but does emphasize what is important to the business

For each value create a statement that completes the statement

"People will be ...(insert value)... when they". Here are a couple of examples:

Guiding Principles are critical for long-term consistency.

You may not refer to your guiding principles daily, but they are useful to ensure that the long-term culture of the business is not eroded by decisions made for short-term expediency. As well, as time goes by people come and go from the organization, and the original vision for how the business would conduct itself can often get lost.

With the ability to refer back to your guiding principles, when a significant design choice is proposed - such as stopping employee involvement - you are able to ensure that short-term expedient choices don't have a long-term negative impact on the outcomes the business wants to achieve.

The point is that before members of your organization make specific design choices, they must recognise the principles behind those choices. That way, months or years later, the design choices people are making will be based on carefully articulated principles, or guidelines that fit the business strategy and long-term outcomes desired by the organization - not just meet short-term expediency.

Step Four: Apply the Principles

Many organizations spend (read waste) a lot of time developing their principles and/or values. Maybe even having them printed up and placed in cards and handbooks. And that is often as far as it goes. This process (develop values ... stick them in a handbook) is followed by many thousands of organizations and all it does is breed cynicism and discontent. You know this to be true - you probably work in one of those organizations!

Leaders communicate their commitment to the organizational values and principles more by their actions than their words. For example at one of the companies I worked at, Teamwork and Flexibility were two of our values.

One time we had a major fire in the facility and for the next fortnight everyone in the facility was involved in the cleaning and sweeping up of the mess - from the Site Manager to the Receptionist to the team members whose 'job' it was. Does that mean the Site Manager and Receptionist should be on the end of a broom all the time - of course not. However, if in the moment it is the right thing to do then you must illustrate the principle by living the principle ... of being a team member and being flexible in what you will do.

On the Organization Design page I said "Organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get". Here's an example from history of how managers didn't think through the consequences of a design choice:

Use the questions above as you make similar type decisions in your business to give yourself a much better chance of making design choices that will lead to the long-term health and agility of your business.